A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving 1973

New Book from Desiring God

A couple of days ago Desiring God released a new book that sounds interesting. The title is Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother's Heart and Hope, and it is a compilation book by the following authors: Christina Fox, Gloria Furman, Christine Hoover, Rachel Jankovic, Rachel Pieh Jones, Carolyn McCulley, and Trillia Newbell. The book is edited by Tony and Karalee Reinke.

The Desiring God website describes the book in a blog post this way:

Our new book cuts through the nonsense of competitive mothering. Eight bright women expose the spiritual corruption of it and explore how gospel grace is relevant for the daily trials and worries of motherhood. In the trenches, these moms have learned to redirect their hope and trust from the shifting sands of popular opinion to the unchanging all-sufficiency of God.

I haven't actually read this book yet, but it sounds interesting, so I am sharing it for all of the mothers in my life that I know.

There are three digital formats of this book that are currently free and will work on your kindle or ipad. You can find these free versions by clicking here.

Christ Died For God - Steve Camp

Christ died for God and God was satisfied with Christ.

Strategy of the month for November

The strategy is "questioning" and the character is The Question.

Free Advent Devotional

In a recent post on the Desiring God website, the new Advent Devotional by John Piper has been made available. The book can be purchased through Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle e-book, but Desiring God has made the pdf available as a download for free. 

Here is the description of this book (and Advent) from the Desiring God website:

Advent is for adoring Jesus. 

The Christmas season is one of the busiest times of the year. But it is also a season of reflection and preparation for that special day when we mark Immanuel’s coming—the arrival of our eternal God in our own frail humanity. 

This is the greatest of history’s many wonders, something too stupendous to celebrate just on one day. Advent is a way of lengthening and intensifying the joy of Christmas. 

These 25 brief devotional readings from John Piper begin on December 1 and carry us to Christmas Day. Our hope is that God would use these meditations to deepen and sweeten your adoration of Jesus and help you keep him at the center of your Christmas season.

Head on over to the Desiring God website and download this devotional today. Read it with me through the holiday season.

not for incarnation's sake

"... Jesus did not become incarnate for incarnations sake, as if the incarnation were itself sufficient to save his people. Our plight is not that we are finite, that we are not-God; and the remedy for our plight is not some new metaphysical connection to God. Rather, our plight is ethical: We have sinned, and therefore we are in a state of personal estrangement from our Creator. Jesus' in carnation was a means of bringing about reconciliation between ourselves and God."
~John M. Frame (pg. 899 Systematic Theology)

This is really important.

How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home by Derek W.H. Thomas - Book Review

I finished reading the book How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home on the bus, on my way to school this morning. I don't remember exactly when I started this book, but it was my "morning plug and chug" book.

How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home, by Derek Thomas is a book that is an exposition of Romans 8. Each chapter deals with a few verses from the chapter, explaining their meaning and their application in the Christian life, according to the larger context of the Epistle to the Romans.

The Gospel truly does bring us all the way home. The Gospel message is not just for those who are hearing it for the first time. It is not the message that gets you to be a Christian, but is never revisited... The Gospel is for when you were saved, when you are being saved, and for when you will be saved.  The Christian lives and breathes the Gospel. We are to preach it to ourselves and remind ourselves of the Gospel every day of our lives. This book does a wonderful job of highlighting how the Gospel flows to every part of the Christian's life and being.

There are three things about this book that I would like to point out:

1) This book had a very "Pastoral" feel. While reading it, I felt as if I was being shepherded by a brother in Christ... someone sharing their learning experiences with this chapter in the Bible. I would assume that Derek Thomas is a pastor of a church, and I would make the guess that this book was an outpouring of a sermon series that he had worked (and preached) through at his church.

2) This book is very helpful. I suppose that this point could probably fit into the previous point, but not every helpful book is pastoral in nature. These two things don't always go hand-in-hand, but in the case of this book they were arm-in-arm. With each passing chapter, I found myself applying some point or other that Derek Thomas was making. Quite often there were aspects of the teaching that were directly applicable to that very day when I was actually doing the reading in the morning. Several times there were issues that sprang up one day, and the next morning, while I was reading, I found something perfectly relevant to the issue from the previous day. These are my favorite sort of books.

3) This book was full of relevant quotes. Sometimes when I read a book that is full of quotes, it is almost as if the author is attempting to show-off his literary prowess. It can feel bragadoscious to keep quoting obscure portions of text from famous authors. That was not the case with this book. I found many, if not all of the quotes that he shared to be very fitting for the occasion, and would often serve as a summary of one teaching or other that he was attempting to get across.